Academic ESP Oral Production

Author(s):  
Soraya García-Sánchez ◽  
Conchi Hernández-Guerra

Current higher education students are frequently engaged to 24/7 interconnectedness, which should contribute towards their careful awareness of other languages and cultures at the time of receiving or communicating information. English remains the international language higher education learners and professional citizens in general need to perform to access the most competent job vacancies. This chapter is based on assessing oral production tasks that pursue to enhance speaking skills, team-work competences, and problem-solving in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses in the Degrees of History and Social Work. The results compare not only the oral outcomes of these two ESP groups but what evaluation procedures and assessment criteria have been considered to promote successful communication in English. Equally, this ESP content would be analysed to observe if teams succeeded in building not only local needs but also a conscious global education that is responsibly engaged with other cultures, as promoted by the global competence.

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 233-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Frost ◽  
Francis Picavet

This paper presents some of the difficulties of teaching languages, in particular English, in the context of LSP/LAP2 programmes in French universities. The main focus of this paper will be the importance of prosody, especially in English, as an area where these difficulties may be addressed. We will outline the various solutions that are currently being put into place as part of the Innovalangues project, a six-year international language teaching and research project headed by Université Stendhal (Grenoble 3), France. The project has substantial funding from the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research and its mission is to develop innovative tools and measures to help LSP/LAP learners reach B2 on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL). The languages concerned are English, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and possibly French as a foreign language. Initially the project will be focusing on the needs of Grenoble’s students, but the objective is to make the tools and resources developed freely available to the wider community. Oral production and reception are at the heart of Innovalangues. We believe, along with many other researchers, that prosody is key to comprehension and to intelligibility (Kjellin 1999a, Kjellin 1999b, Munro and Derwing 2011, Saito 2012), particularly given the important differences between English and French prosody (Delattre 1965; Hirst and Di Cristo 1998; Frost 2011). In this paper, we will present the particular difficulties inherent in teaching English (and other foreign languages) in the context of ESP/EAP3 in French universities and some of the solutions that we are implementing through this project (Picavet et al., 2012; Picavet et al 2013; Picavet and Frost 2014). These include an e-learning platform for which various tools are being developed, teacher training seminars focusing on prosody and the collection of data for research.  


Author(s):  
Marina Polukhina ◽  
Maria Doskovskaya

The world is changing at an increasing pace. We are living in a time of dramatic transformations such as globalization with its impact on economic competitiveness and social cohesion, international mobility, new occupations and careers, advances in technology and its use. Such processes affected the higher education of many countries, including Russia, and created the concept of global education. Nowadays our students have the opportunity and challenge of living and working in such a diverse and rapidly changing world. Thus, renewing the educational concept of universities is becoming relevant. In this article, the authors consider definitions and dimensions of global competence as an essential component of training young specialists as well as 21st century learning in the context of global competence. The authors present how global competence is defined as the combination of the four dimensions and how each dimension builds on specific knowledge, skills, attitudes and values: Also, the paper considers the ways of renewing higher education in Russia and points of growth.


2017 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen S. Conley ◽  
Jenna B. Shapiro ◽  
Alexandra C. Kirsch ◽  
Joseph A. Durlak

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anabela Pereira ◽  
P. Vagos ◽  
L. Santos ◽  
A. Monteiro-Ferreira ◽  
A. Melo ◽  
...  

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